Who are these people going around orking cows? I mean cows aren't that intelligent. It's hardly a challenge to sneak up on them and ork them. In any case it will be interesting to see what such cow-orkers think of Perl, won't it? I'm predicting that they'll be mostly written in Perl, now that Bovine::Orking was released on CPAN.

It depends on the definition of cow-orker! (It's a small world after all.)

If it includes the:

people working directly with me on a day to day basis then I'd say "are Perl Monks" and "love Perl".

folks that I help out in other departments that are supporting Perl scripts, then I'd say "like Perl" (it's always a quick fix when something goes wrong).

managers of other products, I'd say "are suspicious of Perl". ('This PERL thing, how long has it been in use? Is it stable? Is it going to cost us more money?' etc...)

single platform activists , I'd say "dislike Perl" or even "hate Perl". ('We need to move everything to a single platform. Solaris with an Oracle database system and everything written in Java!' yadda yadda... They won't give it a chance.)

folks who in other departments who run the Perl scripts, then I'd say "just use Perl".

folks outside of IT, then I'd have to say "have never heard of Perl". ('Pearl? What's that?')

"folks" that I play with on daily basis, then I'd definitely say "are written in Perl".

A small part of your problem (as well as most of us :), would be solved with another option of "Fear Perl" :). Coworkers fear perl because they do not know anything about it, but know that it's technology which leads to "what if it replaces me," and in many cases they are easily replaced by a few lines of code, and hate it for that reason. That rolls together suspicion, dislike (the coworker who are not replaced), hate (the ones who were replaced), lack of knowlege, and possibly brings in coworkers written in perl :).

My coworkers have not used Perl. They are not biased against it, but they do have many of the common misconceptions. However, we recently found ourselves in a situation where for our new document management system, hosted on Apache+JBoss, we needed a way to handle file downloads. I was told that this had to be implemented with a Servlet in JBoss because the access control system required calling some database procedures, but there was much fretting over the use of a servlet for the actual file downloads because some of the files are big.

So I said, "well, why not let Apache handle the downloads." And they said, "well what about access control." So I said, "why not write a mod_perl authentication handler for the access check and an output filter to deal with the fact that the files are locally encrypted" and they were intrigued. Now, of course, the challenge is that I need to give them some actual code :)

Java guys despise it and want to go on holy crusades against it, cool hacker types that like to get things done love it, hardware/firmware types are like "umh, what's that"... I'd like to rewrite my managers in Perl.

Thanks for the generalization. Those of us who are hybdid programmers must all hate what we do then... But I like what I do, therefore, I don't exist. Crap.

Update:
The alternate version of this is (thanks to L~R point it out), should be, sorry to hear your java guys are like that and sorry if I did misunderstand. If you meant that about all, my post still stands :)

----Give me strength for today..
I will not talk it away..
Just for a moment..
It will burn through the clouds..
and shine down on me.

sporty,
We obviously didn't parse the AM's statement the same way. Since the title of the poll is My cow-orkers mostly..., I read it as:

Of my cow-orkers, the Java guys despise..
The opinion that this was not a generalization but a distinct select group became stronger when I read the last sentence: I'd like to rewrite my managers in Perl

The word 'my' ne 'all'. In any case, I agree that in general, people make a lot of generalizations on things offend the group as a whole or at least individuals that do not fit the generalization. I just didn't see that happening here.

My colleagues dislike Perl largely because it isn't C# or VB.NET. The lack of a "point-and-click" design tool -- even though our use for Perl has to do with text-mode automation tools -- leaves them disgusted. That, and they can't wrap their head around the idea that I don't need the full (pricey) ActiveState Komodo and PDK to develop and even compile Perl code.

To them, the $200 price tag of the ActiveState kit is seen as "Perl costs more than C# -- C# is only $100". One or two are finally understanding that I use the free version of Perl with SciTE to develop all of our automation tools -- and that the $200 license we've purchased from ActiveState was a waste, since I'm the only Perl devel and I don't use it.

Write Perl code in their basements at night (if indeed at all) and never let their code see the light of day. Perhaps they'll run a newsletter or a blog from home servers. They'll use it for system maintenance & all kinds of utility purposes on their Linux & FreeBSD boxen that they keep hidden away and never ever speak of in the office...

Back in the office - in the land of Windoze desktops, cube forests, waterfall development cycles, and unsurmountable feature creep...

If someone mentions it in their presence they will over-compensate with criticism thinking someone is trying to out them.

If someone actually USES it in PRODUCTION - alas in their extreme jealousy - the Inquisition begins.

On the bright side: the Inquisition came before & fell upon the necks of the .ASP'ers & VB'ers.

Fortunately I started learning Java shortly after learning Perl - always chasing that Holy Grail of Platform Independence... So I find myself WITH a job. Provided they stay out of my basement... :-\

In my current job (well the job I had until just before Christmas when they downsized me) perl was seen as a "hackers" language.

Now, I can understand this attitude from the management who didn't have a clue on technical matters, but the sys admins also had this attitude, as if the use of perl would encroach on their area.

They even went as far as removing perl from our unix installation to make sure no one used it (though curiosly they left the fortran compiler installed), stating that shell scripts should be enough for what we required.

Actually, perl gets a lot of respect in my office. We're a pure unix shop, spun off from SGI and now 90% Linux. Every desk has a Windows box, but some of them are collecting dust in the corner.
The prevailing attitude is that perl has it's place, but if you need to write fast code (as opposed to writing code fast), you need C. Since we build video server platforms, I really can't argue. That said, perl has a place in the product and the company. Some of our database tools are perl, our test tools are mostly perl, and our product's internal diagnostic scripts are perl. Morover, every week or so I get a rush job to test something very specific or recreate a scenario that's surfaced in the field. Perl to the rescue.

Where is "I don't have coworkers because I don't have a job, you insensitive clod!" -- oh, that's right, on the ./ poll, right above "are CowboyNeal fanatics".

Seriously, though, I voted for "are written in Perl" because the utilities I've written in Perl over the years have saved me more work than most of my human counterparts. Unfortunately, I think that's part of why my latest employer thinks my job will be so easy to fill somewhere that the going pay rate is twice what it is here.

Anyway, no reason to be bitter I guess. I wish them luck, and hopefully they wish me luck on the job hunt, too. Perl should come in just as handy at the next place that hires me, and maybe they won't be so quick to toss me out for silly reasons like physical proximity to the servers which were here when I was hired and which I successfully worked on for over a year after they moved.

I work in a bioinformatics lab - mostly everything I've done has been done in Perl. In my little world, things like C are trusted but used as a last resort, and other languages like Java and C++ are mistrusted and all but unused.

I am currently searching for a job, so I have no co-workers. But as I hope to find a job in the bioinformatics industry, and Perl is a fairly often used language there, I hope to be able to vote in a few weeks for "My co-workers love Perl".

Most of my work has to do with automating tasks, so I can safely say my co-workers are written in Perl. My employer used to hire an army of temps to go through various logs and spot/fix problems (easy fixes, usually, like restoring readable permissions on shared folders). Now, a nightly script does it all.

80% of developers I work with love perl, the others are too stupid to see the truth.
100% of dba's hate it beacuse our Perl DBI scripts hit the production box real hard.
Lucky our IT Co-ordinator is a Perl Monk par excellance!

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

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